I talked with Raymond King and Mark Dilley at RecentChangesCamp in February (uh... I mean Pluviôse) about their plans to develop Mark's excellent SwitchWiki wiki directory into something... more. I'm glad to see that WikiIndex is really picking up steam. It's becoming my first-stop for getting information on what's wiki, what's not, and who's doing what.
The site uses MediaWiki, but the principles and community are very much rooted in the traditions of Ward's Wiki, MeatballWiki and CommunityWiki. I really hope this site keeps up it's momentum and growth.
tags: wiki wikiindex mark dilley raymond king recentchangescamp
CC Salon in Montreal
Tonight is the first Creative Commons Salon in Montreal. The get-together is at Café l’Étranger, 680 Sainte-Catherine Ouest (at Alymer) at 19h30. More details on the Creative Commons Canada blog: http://creativecommons.ca/blog/?p=185 .
Maj and I are trying to get a sitter for the event -- Amita June is starting to get grumpier and grumpier about going to sleep after 8PM. But I'll be there regardless.
Great camping Website
So, maybe I just haven't been camping a lot in other places outside Quebec in a while, but I'm extremely impressed with the quality of the Sépaq Web site. You can search the entire network for available campsites based on various criteria (size of tent vs. RV, for example), and then use a map-based interface to browse possible sites. The maps go down to the individual site level, and have popup descriptions of each and every site -- how much sun, how close to water, how private, etc. It's really nice.
I have my quibbles -- we tend to do road-trip camping, where we'll stay in a different campground each night for a few days. It'd be nice to do all those reservations at once, but the site doesn't support that. And there are some search criteria I'd like to be able to specify (number of neighbors, access by car) that aren't possible. But as far as it goes, this is a real good site.
tags: quebec camping sepaq sépaq reservations
Wikispam lockdown
I've been having a real problem with Wikispam on my site lately -- several of my pages have nothing-to-sniff-at PageRank values of 6 or 7, and I think that attracts a certain spammity crowd. I think that dealing with Wikispam is something most wiki sites do very well-- an active community is the best counter-measure against spam. And there are lots of good tools, like regexp filters, per-page locking, email and IM notification, and ip blocking that make it easier to maintain a site.
But I don't have an active community working on this site -- it's pretty much just me. And WiLiKi, as beautiful and Scheme-y as it is, doesn't have many of the anti-spam tools that users of other wiki engines take for granted.
I plan on building more anti-spam tools into the site, but for now I've just been locking the site up when I'm not writing something. It's not as wiki-ish, but it does keep my writing up more often. I'd feel pretty bad about it, but it looks like Alex locks up CommunityWiki for days at a time.
tags: wiki spam wikispam wiliki pagerank
Amazon man at the door
Just got an order from Amazon in... full of CDs and books. When I used to live in my car (long story, there), I had my 100 favorite CDs in a box in the back. It was safe there in tons of cities -- Chicago, Saint Louis, New York City, even Monterrey and Guanajuato. But I parked it about a block from It's Tops in San Francisco one night while visiting home, and one of my windows was smashed and the discs were taken. Devastating.
Slowly but surely I've been re-stocking my music collection, but it's painful to buy the same album twice (and, yes, I know... I shoulda made backups! I do that now). Today's shipment contained a lot of stuff I re-bought: ''The Last Waltz'', a bunch of Neil Young (including the DVD of Greendale), and one of my favorite albums ever, the eponymous first album from Lamb.
Also in the box were a bunch of Lost paperbacks ("inspired by the hit series") and the hardback copy of Bad Twin, the mystery novel supposedly written by one of the people who died in the crash of Flight 815. Yeah, I know -- but I like the show, dangit.
tags: lost lamb cd amazon san francisco theft music bad twin
Best thing ever
Vaguely reminiscent of the very fine Good or Bad? feature from Brunching Shuttlecocks, bestthing.info, by the enigmatic but talented xkcd, is a good way to waste a few minutes.